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Google I/O 2021 and Uncomfortable Questions
Android app development books
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,241 posts.
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Query Engines: Push vs. Pull
People talk a lot about “pull” vs. “push” based query engines, and it’s pretty obvious what that means colloquially, but some of the details can be a bit hard to figure out.
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How many engineers does it take to make subscripting work?
The select part is actually fine. But for updates, especially for complex updates, it could be pretty verbose and far from being ergonomic. What would you say to this syntax instead?
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Making Generative Art with Rust
Artists as technical experts and an interview with generative artist Alexis André
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Implicit In-order Forests: Zooming a billion trace events at 60fps
In the course of trying to figure out how to smoothly zoom timelines of a billion trace events, I figured out a cool tree structure that I can’t find elsewhere online, which it turned out two of my friends have independently derived after not finding anything on their own searches. It’s a way of implementing an index…
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Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen.
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Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average
A reader asks: Ben, I believe you have written at least once about how surprisingly few times the stock market has grown near its long-term average in a given year. In other words, its typical annual returns are well above its long-term ~10% average, or well below. I’m searching for it on your blog site...
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Internal Combustion Engine
Interactive article explaining how an internal combustion engine works.
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Evolution of Random Number Generators
Prime powers have a kinda chaotic pattern in their bits. We bootstrap this idea into a good random number generator, recapitulating history.
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What's going on here, with this human?
The philosopher Kwame Appiah writes that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” When I try to figure out what game I’m playing, I see that for the last 25 years I have been playing […]
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Inheritance was invented as a performance hack
It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula . The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look.
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I booked my cheapest one-month trip
In this post, you'll discover how I was able to find the cheapest airfare and car rental for a one-month trip to the American Southwest.
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Excess Deaths in 2020
Update Updated on April 29th, 2021. The CDC continues to update its counts of deaths by cause for 2020 as data comes in from the jurisdictions that report to it. The data are by now fairly complete, though there are still significant gaps in several states due to delayed reporting. North Carolina, in particular, has…
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The Fourier transform is a neural network
The site of Sid
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Market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure (2007)
An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog
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The United States needs to learn how to learn
I just saw an announcement from November of 2020 in which the Federal Transit Administration proposes to study international best practices… in on-demand public transit. It goes without sayin…
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On UML
A little context: I got introduced to UML in around 2008, at an employer who had a site licence for Enterprise Architect. I was sent on a training course run by a company that no longer exists called Sun Microsystems: every day for a week I would get on a coach to Marble Arch, then...
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Ideal divisors: when a division compiles down to just a multiplication
The division instruction is one of the most expensive instruction in your CPU. Thus optimizing compilers often compile divisions by known constants down to a multiplication followed by a shift. However, in some lucky cases, the compiler does not even need a shift. I call the corresponding divisors ideal. For the math…
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Who won the Amstel Gold Race? Human error in photo-finishes
Investigating the photo-finish of last Sunday's Amstel Gold Race. With millimeters separating the two riders does the photo-finish camera tell the truth?
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Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
Well, somebody had to find it.
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Diving Deep on S3 Consistency
A deep dive on why we changed Amazon S3's consistency model
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Ed Balls Day
Ed Balls Day is a bit of fun and the stuff of nonsense. It celebrates and remembers the day (28 April 2011) when British politician Ed Balls tweeted his name thinking he was entering it into a sear…